Vehicle owners or users are frequently assessed a fee for use of commonly or publicly owned infrastructure (as well as public or private infrastructure owned or managed by private entities) such as toll roads, bridges and tunnels. Such fees are typically referred to as tolls. The public is also often required to fund the development and maintenance of such infrastructure primarily through use of various taxes including, in particular, a tax on fuel. Significant inequities, however, occur because such taxes as the fuel tax are not paid by infrastructure users in proportion to their use of the infrastructure. For example, typically vehicles which have a greater fuel economy (than an average fuel economy) pay less and electric vehicles often pay nothing. Tolls which are collected at particular locations along a highway or at the entrance of a tunnel additionally only crudely tax vehicles in proportion to their use. Such tax collection and tolling systems are additionally expensive to implement and maintain, and can contribute to congestion on the nation's roadways as vehicles queue waiting to pay the toll. Because of these inequities and inefficiencies, there is a need for a ubiquitous and fair infrastructure charging system to eliminate the drawbacks of the current system.
One solution has been recently expressed in a book: “Many more things would become possible if the cloud knew the position of a car and its status. For example, road tolls could be collected virtually just by calculating the distance using the GPS data. There would be no need to construct costly toll-collection infrastructure. This way, things like toll collection would cease being a hardware thing and would become a software thing with all the benefits of software—lower costs, quicker upgrades, faster implementation, and ease of use. The last point is especially valid, because once hardware infrastructure is in place, it's much harder to make any changes if it proves to be user-unfriendly—it's much easier to tweak things with software.” [Daniel Kellmereit and Daniel Obodovski, The Silent Intelligence the Internet of Things, www.thesilentintelligence.com].
A detailed discussion of additional background information is set forth in parents and published patent applications, for example, U.S. Pat. Nos. 9,053,633, 7,085,637, 7,110.880, 7,202,776, 7,672,756 8,260,537 and 9,528,834, all of which are incorporated by reference herein.
Electronic toll collection systems are described in U.S. Pat. Nos. 8,245,921, 8,587,484, 8,615,424, 8,660,890, and 8,843,390.
All of the patents, patent applications, technical papers and other references mentioned below and in the parent applications are incorporated by reference herein in their entirety. No admission is made that any or all of these references are prior art and indeed, it is contemplated that they may not be available as prior art when interpreting 35 U.S.C. §102 in consideration of the claims of the present application.
Possible definitions of terms used in the specification and claims are also found in the parent applications and/or related applications. Others are included herein.